What I said at FemmeCon

I had the pleasure of performing–along with other Body Heat luminaries Kathleen Delaney, Alex Cafarelli and Gigi Frost (with our amazing Lady Ms Vagina Jenkins backstage, being Organizer Extraordinaire)– last week at FemmeSPEAK, the spoken word event at FemmeCon 2012 in Baltimore. Each of us got four minutes to connect with a raucous, fierce and gorgeous crowd. Here’s what I read (a bit sexually explicit, just as a heads-up):

We deserve pleasure. This is what we have been healing for.

This is my love letter to a young hungry survivor femme (and by young, of course, I mean all of us: still learning to open, to lean, to reach, to feed ourselves).

It takes everything we have to reoccupy our skin, and it is a revolution every time we reach out for another. It is a revolution when we take our fingers to our own fine and wounded skin and bring forth the pleasure that is sometimes our only birthright. We were built for joy, and no molester’s hands can truly lift that from us, can take away what we actually deserve, that deep intimacy with our fierce and tender selves, the extraordinary capacity of these bodies to meet and recognize and accept and offer pleasure, even after a lifetime of terror and rage and pain.

This is what I’ve been aching to say, and to hear: Want exactly as you want. Come exactly as you come. At this fierce moment, amid these fingers and palms, skin and mouths and full-blooded cunts that sing now both of pleasure and rage,we do not have give anyone else permission to vet the contours of our longing. Are not required to subvert sublimate subsume the actual exquisite aroma of our longing to someone else’s dictates about how a femme is supposed to want or supposed to fuck.

Look at the rules laid out for you and step across them please.

We deserve the full and complicated body of our bodies, the full and complicated breadth of your desire, and our hunger will scare some people – those, then, aren’t the people we need to have in our beds, no matter how pretty they knot their ties nor how mean they smear their lipstick.

There are those who want to trace you open. There’re those with deft hands and skilled hips yes but also those who recognize your prowess, those who understand that getting fucked isn’t getting flipped or fouled or femmed (as thought to be femmed, to be girled, is the worst thing), those who understand that your hands pressing inside their resilient tenderworn skin doesn’t make them less than.

I want to tell you something: we fuck like girls, which means we know our shit inside and out, pay attention to every nuance, and go hard into every secret whisper, I mean we put it all in our mouths. A femme who knows how and wants to fuck you is a precious thing, not the punchline to a joke, and sure as hell not a threat (except, of course, when she is).

There are those out there who want to have you and want to hold the full expression of your delight, and if that includes being the one with the cock strapped to your hip, girl, don’t shove that down in service of being somebody’s safe kind of femme. We have worked too goddamn hard, you and I, to allow delight swell back into our skin to let them tear it from us now.

If you are a pillow queen size queen girl shout that shit all through to the morning starlight. And if you have a fist skilled and ravenous and long to sink that good muscle into butch or femme or otherwise-gendered flesh, let me tell you like no one should even have to that that doesn’t make you any less a femme – it maybe makes you more. Let all of your hunger claim you. It’s what has saved you this far. It’s how we learned again that we were worth feeding, didn’t we, worth saving, worth fighting for, worth listening to. If you want your mouth on another girl, honey, find her. Look around this room; we’re all hungry eyes, open mouths, deep and too-long-quieted longing. There’s no one right way for a femme to fuck. I want you to let it go, girl, let yourself go. The world only changes when we can save ourselves and feed. Let your hunger sing free.